School districts are public school systems that provide regular, special, and/or vocational education services for children in pre-kindergarten through 12th grade. The United States has more than 14,000 public school districts and spends more than $500 billion on public elementary and secondary education each year. However, the quality of education, the level of student achievement attributable to a school district (or individual schools within a district), the availability and quality of after school programs and sports, and the like tend to vary dramatically among the various school districts and individual schools within each district. As such, in selecting a location for a home, the school district to which the home belongs, as well as the individual schools of attendance within the school district for the home, are often primary driving forces behind the determination of where to live for many families and/or homebuyers.
Despite the emphasis on the importance of selecting a location for a home based on the quality of schools, identifying the school district and schools of attendance for a particular address can be a challenging and frustrating endeavor. Public school systems in the United States are locally administrated, and their geographic structure varies by state and region. For example, some districts in the Mid-Atlantic and New England states follow county, township, or city boundaries, while districts in the Midwest and Western states are generally independent of municipal boundaries and frequently intersect statistical areas like Census tracts and block groups. Furthermore, school boundaries may need adjustment each school year at the district level or at the individual school level to accommodate enrollment changes, adding or closing schools, new residential developments, and the like.
Many school districts provide PDF's of the district boundaries by school year. However, PDF's are generally not user friendly and fail to provide the information most users are searching for, including schools of attendance for a particular address. Further exacerbating these challenges, many boundary maps available to the community, prospective residents, and parents are outdated or otherwise inaccurate. Due to the changing and often complex nature of school boundaries and lack of reliable and easily accessible resources, school districts and individual schools are often queried to provide schools of attendance for a particular residence, thereby detracting from school resources that could otherwise be focused on education, as well as making the process of selecting a residence for families tedious and time consuming.
It is with these observations in mind, among others, that various aspects of the present disclosure were conceived and developed.